Teachers fill in gaps on genocide

Mary Olson has told the story many times before, about men clubbed with shovels and buried alive, and women marched into the desert to die with their babies.

She tells of a family--her family--fleeing Turkish officers during World War I and how they tried to save themselves by attempting to sacrifice their youngest.

Weaving snippets of her family's personal history into a horrific retelling of Armenian genocide, Olson transfixed a teenage audience during a recent U.S. history class at Warren Township High School in Gurnee.

Olson has given the speech for years but has found herself in greater demand since the state approved a law that requires that acts of genocide--above and beyond the Holocaust--be included in elementary and high school curricula.

Social studies teachers throughout Illinois have taken note since the law took effect in August, said Phyllis Henry, president of the Illinois Council for the Social Studies.

That group is organizing conferences and compiling material that covers not only the Nazi persecution of Jews but also mass killings in Armenia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan.

"If you look at textbooks, depending on how old they are . . . sometimes they only have a paragraph on the Armenian genocide," said Henry, manager of social studies for the Chicago Public Schools.

She said teachers must keep themselves informed of current events, such as genocide being carried out in Sudan's western Darfur region.

At Warren, the law has raised awareness among teachers, who tie the information to their lessons, Olson said.

"Up until now, what they've mostly taught is the Holocaust," said Olson, 54, director of curriculum and school improvement for Warren Township High School District 121.

The lessons resonate with students, especially when told by a descendant, such as Olson, whose grandparents fled Armenia during WW I.

She recently provided juniors and seniors at Warren's Almond Road Campus with a quick backdrop to World War I, aided by a map, an Armenian coin, 100-year-old books outlining atrocities committed even before the genocide, and her grandmother's embroidery.

She explained that the term "genocide" was coined after Turkish leaders during the Ottoman Empire nearly wiped out the Armenian population by killing more than 1 million people from 1915 to 1918.

Her talk was not just a history lesson but also an example of how things that happened long ago affect public policy today.

The Turkish government still disputes the description of the mass murders as genocide, saying the killings took place within the larger context of the war and that 350,000 Turks also died in battle. The United States, in an effort to maintain diplomatic relations with Turkey, does not use the term genocide to describe the mass Armenian killings.

But President Bush, in a statement on Armenian Remembrance Day last April 24, acknowledged the "forced exile and mass killings of as many as 1.5 million Armenians."

In Massachusetts the Assembly of Turkish American Associations sued the school system after educators removed Turkish Web sites from a curriculum aimed at teaching about genocide.

Narguiz Abbaszade, spokeswoman for the assembly, said the lawsuit was "purely a freedom-of-speech issue."

"The Turkish community feels they are not able to put forward their interpretation of what happened," she said. The lawsuit is ongoing.

Olson said she wanted to try to prove that the Turkish side is "revisionist history."

"Armenians were second-class citizens in Turkey. The Turks were trying for a long time to find a way to rid themselves of the Christians," Olson said.

At one point she talked about a husband and wife who believed that the only way they could escape the Turks while hiding in a mountainous region was to throw the youngest of their three children over a cliff. That way, they could carry the other two children for miles. But the little boy survived after landing on a ledge, and his cries alerted their foes.

The family members were caught and tortured. They survived the ordeal but resented the child because his survival led to their capture, she said.

"How do I know that story?" she said. "The little boy was my uncle by marriage."

Students were aghast but curious.

"Usually when anyone talks about genocide or anything like this, people automatically think of World War II," said junior Lisa Alvin, 16, of Wadsworth.

"These people were so desperate," she said. "The choices that they had to make . . . that they would have to kill one of their children for the rest of the group to survive. That would be so hard."

About 10,000 Armenians live in the Chicago area, including substantial communities in Waukegan and Evanston, said Rouben Adalian, director of the Armenian National Institute in Washington.

Many of them are determined to tell their stories before they die, said Adalian, who is pleased that Illinois has included the Armenians in its curriculum.

"It is a valuable presentation. It's done all across the country but nowhere near enough," Adalian said.